Theological Opinions , PART II

[Lief Erikson]

Originally Posted by Jonathan

Gwai also brought up Verse 26: "If a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits sin, he will die for it; because of the sin he has committed he will die." Too me it seems a single crime justifies the death penalty. Not just the whole batch.

Look at your own quotation. It says, "turns from his righteousness and commits sin." Not "commits a sin." "Commits sin." That could be singular or plural, and seeing as the part that I referenced is decidedly plural, it only makes sense to assume it's talking about the whole batch rather than one.

Furthermore, I think another important thing to note in this chapter is that its main objective is to explain that a son doesn't die for the father's sin but for his own sin. The chapter is trying to explain that this is fair to a culture which believed differently. The purpose of the chapter wasn't to lay down specific times or situations in which the death penalty was to be used. The Penateuch does that. Rather, it was doing something rather like we do when explaining something.

When we want to make an explanation, we might say, "Even if five million is multiplied by zero, the answer is still zero." We're using a big number in order to explain to a someone that zero is the result no matter what number you multiply by zero.

We use this form of explanation in other things too. For example, in my favorite sport fencing an instructor might say, "even if you do a perfect lunge, your body arching out perfectly following your arm and your blade tip touching your opponent's jacket and making a perfect touch, and the director doesn't see it, you don't get the point."

I think that in this chapter, the Lord is doing the same thing. He's taking a whole bunch of evil sins, lumping them all together and saying, "even if a wicked man does all these things and then turns to righteousness, he will be forgiven."

He's not laying out exactly what crimes deserve the death penalty. If you want to argue that the death penalty is used too frequently in the Old Testament, you probably would do best to check out the Pentateuch.